Maximizing SMS for Nonprofits: Engaging Volunteers and Donors (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: If you're in the nonprofit world, SMS can certainly be a value to you as well. You could send SMS messages for volunteer opportunities and ask people to fill out a form and sign up right from the message. You could use it for fundraising, whether that's to have people donate directly from the text message or to get people involved in your fundraising events. And to go along with that, there are event reminders you could send. You could send an announcement or maybe a save-the-date via text message, or even thank-yous. Thank people after they attend your event or thank people after they've donated to your cause. Any other ideas you want to throw out there for ways that nonprofits can use text messaging?

Speaker 2: You know, because in the nonprofit world, right, it's really all about kind of activating people and getting them organized around the particular cause. What I love about the text channel and the immediacy of it is that you've really got this opportunity to call people's attention towards certain things. And so this is a situation where, of course, you don't have a lot of room to do things on the text channel. And so let's say you send out an important email or a newsletter update or something like that, where you're really getting into the nitty-gritty of a particular cause. The text channel is a great opportunity to call attention to that, to let people know that, hey, you know, there's a really important thing relating to a cause here that you should check out and learn more about. Again, just letting things, if something, if you've got a very timely cause that you're working on and things are happening within that, it's a great opportunity to let or get people up to date, keep people up to date with that. Of course, as you're getting people subscribed, you know, part of that is a confirmation if people are joining your text list. So another good follow-up is just to welcome them and let them know how glad you are that they're part of the community here and part of that particular channel. You know, even depending on the nature of the nonprofit, you know, there's the nonprofit piece of it, the fundraising piece of it, but there's also the people you serve. And you know, it might make sense to send out some type of helpful messages or something relating to the cause that way. You know, maybe you're trying to help people overcome a particular ailment or something that they're doing. And so you can send inspirational messages to people, or maybe health is an important thing for your nonprofit and you might want to send out, you know, healthy habit reminders or things like that. It's really about thinking about what it is that you do, who is that audience that you're speaking to in that channel, and what is going to provide them some value and make sense for them to receive during that channel.